November 16, 2005

What's The Matter With Baghdad?

The fallout from Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the Gulag prisons, and other questionable practices by this Administration is the inability to take the high ground. That, in turn leads to other problems.

Iraq's government said today that it had ordered an urgent
investigation of accusations that 173 detainees found in the basement
of an Interior Ministry building had been tortured by their Iraqi
captors. A senior Iraqi official who visited the detainees said two
appeared paralyzed and others had had the skin peeled off their bodies
by their abusers.

I'm shocked to find there's gambling going on in this casino.

A joint statement by the American Embassy and the United States
military command called the situation "totally unacceptable" and said
American officials "agree with Iraq's leaders that mistreatment of
detainees will not be tolerated."

For American officials and
Iraqi politicians who hold power in the Shiite-led transitional
government, the discovery of what appears to have been a secret torture
center created a new aura of crisis.

For many Iraqis, the episode carried heavy overtones of the brutality associated with Saddam Hussein
and his Sunni-dominated regime. Ominously, for the prospects of curbing
rising sectarianism here, the abused detainees appeared to have been
almost all Sunni Arabs, and their abusers Shiite policemen loyal to the
notorious Badr Organization, a militia with close links to Iran.

For
American officials in Iraq, still laboring under the shadow of the Abu
Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and other accusations of mistreatment of
prisoners, the new assertions come at a particularly inopportune moment.

Can't anyone in this Administration understand what Iraq has become? And don't tell me this was an isolated incident, or that it doesn't matter.

The dismay among American officers involved in Sunday's operations was
evident from a report in today's editions of The Los Angeles Times,
which carried the first report of the raid on the Jadriyah building in
its Monday editions.

In its report today, the paper quoted Brig. Gen. Karl Horst of the
Third Infantry Division, commander of the unit that carried out the
raid, as saying that there would be more operations aimed at uncovering
secret detention centers. "We're going to hit every single one of them,
every single one of them," the general said.

Every single one of how many? May I respectfully point out that the chances of using Iraq as a model of democracy in the Middle East are at or near zero? While a thoroughly discredited and demoralized Bush is prattling on about Democrats being unpatriotic, someone in government has to try and get the ship upright. Why, it's gotten so bad, even Republicans have to do something. But what they're not doing is finding out what went wrong in the first place, so I'll remind them.

Comments

At each turn of the page, the Republican nightmare becomes more and more bizarre. I can hardly wait to hear the next set of "talking points" issued by Karl.

Scotty quotes Karl: "Hey, if this is really TRUE, well, it's not good. But remember, you have to see this torture prison thing a sign of PROGRESS in Iraq! Not too long ago these things would be SECRET? See? The real story here, guys, is that FREEDOM is on the march, and for that we all should be grateful and not keep being unpatriotic by spreading lies about how we got into Iraq in the first place."

Absolutely sickening. But you know something like this is coming from Rove, and from the rest of those Republican assholes.

The amendment by the Senate faces an uncertain future. But as political symbolism, the action yesterday showed the determination of the Senate to demand more from the administration. It also underscored how much elected officials are worried about public anxiety over the war. "That is where the public is," Lindsay said, "and the senators were making sure they were on the right side of the political debate."

Your link to No on Gonzales demonstrates the obvious point that none of the mainstream media and so few blogs have so far taken note of: U.S. policy was a model for those secret torture chambers that the U.S. is now so intent on finding every single one of.

Republicans (and the go-along faction of the Democratic Party, with that pathetic Joe Lieberman as the leading light) are too damned late to be on the "right side of the debate." Over the past three years they've had numerous opportunities, and they've repeatedly failed.

I don't want to hear any more excuses. Every one of them who hasn't publicly regretted her or his vote for the IWR, who hasn't publicly excoriated U.S. torture doctrine, who hasn't made clear that the war was the wrong morally and strategically, and that America has been and is now doing more harm than good in the so-called war on terror is officially dead to me.

Let's remember this from George Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech:

"All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

That shocking line alone, about which I don't recall a single word of public protest, puts the lie to any idea that this was not administration policy, set at the top.